Set in Savannah, Georgia, in the early 1970s, this is a novel of youth, its anarchic joy, and its first encounters with the concerns and apprehensions of early adulthood. Francis Doyle, Tim Sullivan, and their three closest friends are altar boys at Blessed Heart Catholic Church and eight-grade classmates at the parish school. They are also inveterate pranksters, suburban Tom Saywers. Bright, artistic, and unimpressed by adult authority, they are sworn to subvert the world that their parents and teachers have made for them. Trouble at school presents the opportunity for their crowning escapade - for a chance to move beyond broken streetlights, playground brawls, and shoplifted junk food. They had barely finished drawing Sodom vs. Gomorrah '74 - a collaborative comic book depicting Blessed Heart's nuns and priests gleefully breaking the seventh commandment - when it fell into the hands of the principal. Certain that their parents will be informed, the boys conspire to create a diversion and buy some time. Their plan is to capture a dangerous wild animal and set it loose in the school. It is a scheme too audacious to abandon, one that will seal their friendships forever. Woven into the details of the boys' preparations for the stunt are author Chris Fuhrman's touching, hilarious renderings of the daily routines of the school day and the initiatory rites of male adolescence, from the first serious kiss to the first serious hangover. Fuhrman also displays his ear for the continual banter of schoolboys, employing its luridly detailed put-downs, exaggerated boasts, and aimless speculations as a backdrop against which the story's main events take place. His descriptions of the boys' lives at home, of their self-absorbed or abusive parents, are rendered discerningly as well. Without moralizing, Fuhrman conveys the notion so central to his story: precocity and idealism aside, the main motivation for the boys to band together is that they find in one another the comfort, support, and approval that are missing at home. In the end, a turn of fate puts more distance between the boys and the comic-book incident than they had ever planned or wanted, and mortality, not adult authority, becomes the enemy against which they must plot. So right in its details of a particular place, time, and state of mind, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys will reawaken its readers' memories of their own precarious passage out of childhood. On the cusp of adolescence, some 13-year-old boys band together, swigging the Sacrament wine behind their priests' backs and drawing illicit comic books depicting nuns and priests engaged in--you guessed it--sex. This fictional memoir of a Catholic boyhood concentrates on the coming-of-age of its narrator, Francis, who a year before the book begins, at 12, attempted suicide. No wonder, considering the dark underside of punitive Catholicism that Francis' story puts generously on display, not least in the figure of the boy's father, who literally beats his son bloody for not eating scorched corned beef. Francis' mother looks on horror-struck and cowed; afterward she is helpless except for the salve she administers. As Francis blunders through his first sexual encounter with a much more experienced girl, gets himself muddy and bloody in school-yard fights with his buddies, and eventually faces the frailty of human life, this darkly comic work by an author who died young well before its publication takes on an increasingly savage tone full of foreboding, grief, and very Catholic reparation. Whitney Scott A light tale of rebellious eighth graders set in a Savannah Catholic junior high school in 1974, written by a young Georgian who died of cancer as he was completing this, his only novel. Francis Doyle is part of a ``gang'' of fellow classmates and altar boys who are from troubled homes and are all too smart and too creative for their conservative school. Besides stealing from their parents' liquor cabinets and experimenting with pot, the gang rebels by creating blasphemous comic books. They're led by the undersized Tim O'Brien, who furthers everyone's education with banned books like William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Since they are about to graduate, the young outlaws come up with what they consider a fitting farewell, Sodom vs. Gomorrah '74, an epic comic book that shows the nuns and priests of Blessed Heart in wicked embraces. When the book is found by one of the priests, the gang is threatened with expulsion. Tim suggests that if they do something really drastic, say kidnapping a bobcat from a local nature preserve and releasing it in the school, the priests would forget about their relatively minor indiscretion. Complicating matters for Francis is that he has fallen in love for the first time, with a seventh grader with an equally turbulent past. But Francis goes along with his buddies as they try to capture a bobcat, with predictably tragic results. Fuhrman is especially successful in capt